Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

Kanai had been translating continuously as Piya was speaking, and when he finished, Moyna gave a loud gasp and covered her face with her hands.

“Was the money not enough?” Piya asked Kanai anxiously.

“Not enough?” Kanai said. “Can’t you see Moyna’s overjoyed? This is a windfall for them. I’m sure they really need the money.”

“And what does Fokir say? Will he be able to arrange for a launch?”

Kanai paused to listen. “He says yes, he’ll do it; he’ll start making the arrangements right away. But there are no motorboats here. You’ll have to use a bhotbhoti.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what diesel boats are called in these parts,” said Kanai. “They’re named for the hammering sound of their engines.”

“I don’t care what kind of boat it is,” said Piya. “The thing is, can he arrange for one?”

“Yes,” said Kanai, “he’ll arrange for one to be here tomorrow. You can look it over.”

“Does he know the owner?”

“Yes. It belongs to someone who’s like a father to him.”

Piya recalled her last experience of hiring a launch and the trouble she had had with the forest guard and his relative. She said, “Do you think this man will be reliable?”

“Yes,” said Kanai with a nod. “I know the man, actually. His name is Horen Naskor. He used to work for my uncle too. I can vouch for him.”

“OK, then.”

Glancing at Fokir, Piya saw there was a grin on his face now, and for a moment it was as though he had once again become the man she had known on the boat, not the sullen, resentful creature he evidently was on land. She could not tell whether it was the prospect of being back on the water that had lifted his spirits or the possibility of escaping from whatever it was that so weighed him down in his home; it was enough that she had been able to offer him something that mattered, whatever it was.

“Listen, Piya.” Kanai nudged her with his elbow. “Moyna has a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“She wants to know why a highly educated scientist like you needs the help of her husband — someone who doesn’t even know how to read and write.”

Piya frowned, puzzling over this. Could Moyna really be as dismissive of her husband as her question seemed to imply? Or was she trying to suggest that Piya should hire someone else? But there was no one else she wanted to work with — especially if the alternatives were men like the forest guard.

“Could you please tell Moyna,” Piya said to Kanai, “that her husband knows the river well. His knowledge can be of help to a scientist like myself.”

When this was explained, Moyna responded with a retort sharp enough to draw a laugh from Kanai.

“Why are you laughing?” said Piya.

“She’s clever, this girl,” said Kanai.

“Why? What did she say?”

“She made a funny little play on the word gyan, which means ‘knowledge,’ and gaan, which means ‘song.’ She said that her life would be a lot easier if her husband had a little more gyan and a little less gaan.”

Nilima was none too pleased by Kusum’s visit. That evening, she said to me, “Do you know that Kusum came to see me today? She was trying to get me involved with that business in Morichjhãpi. They want the Trust to help them set up some medical facilities there.”

“So what did you say?”

“I told them there’s nothing we could do,” Nilima said in her flattest, most unyielding voice.

“Why can’t you help them?” I protested. “They’re human beings; they need medical attention as much as people do anywhere else.”

“Nirmal, it’s impossible,” she said. “Those people are squatters; that land doesn’t belong to them; it’s government property. How can they just seize it? If they’re allowed to remain, people will think every island in the tide country can be seized. What will become of the forest, the environment?”

To this I answered that Lusibari was forest too once — it too once belonged to the government. Yet Sir Daniel Hamilton was allowed to take it over in order to create his experiment. And all these years, Nilima had often said that she admired what he did. What was the difference, then? Were the dreams of these settlers less valuable than those of a man like Sir Daniel just because he was a rich shaheb and they were impoverished refugees?

“But Nirmal,” she said, “what Sir Daniel did happened a long time ago. Just imagine what would become of this whole area if everybody started doing the same thing today. The whole forest would disappear.”

“Look, Nilima,” I said, “that island, Morichjhãpi, wasn’t really forest, even before the settlers came. Parts of it were already being used by the government for plantations and so on. What’s been said about the danger to the environment is just a sham in order to evict these people, who have nowhere else to go.”

“Be that as it may,” said Nilima, “I simply cannot allow the Trust to get involved in this. There’s too much at stake for us. You’re not involved in the day-to-day business of running the hospital, so you have no idea of how hard we’ve had to work to stay on the right side of the government. If the politicians turn against us, we’re finished. I can’t take that chance.”

It was all clear to me now. “So, Nilima,” I said, “what you’re saying is that your position has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the case. You’re not going to help these people because you want to stay on the right side of the government?”

Nilima made her hands into fists and put them on her waist. “Nirmal, you have no idea of what it takes to do anything practical,” she said. “You live in a dream world — a haze of poetry and fuzzy ideas about revolution. To build something is not the same as dreaming of it. Building is always a matter of well-chosen compromises.”

I rarely argued with Nilima when she used this tone of voice. But this time, I too wouldn’t let go: “I don’t see that this compromise is well chosen.”

This made Nilima even angrier. “Nirmal,” she said, “I want you to remember something. It was for your sake that we first came to Lusibari, because your political involvements got you into trouble and endangered your health. There was nothing for me here, no family, friends or a job. But over the years I’ve built something — something real, something useful, something that has helped many people in small ways. All these years, you’ve sat back and judged me. But now it’s there in front of you, in front of your eyes — this hospital. And if you ask me what I will do to protect it, let me tell you, I will fight for it like a mother fights to protect her children. The hospital’s future, its welfare — they mean everything to me, and I will not endanger them. I’ve asked very little of you all this time, but I’m asking you now: stay away from Morichjhãpi. I know the government will not allow the settlers to stay and I know also that they will be vengeful toward anyone who gets mixed up in this business. If you get involved with those settlers you will be endangering my life’s work. Just keep that in mind. That’s all I ask.”

There was nothing more to say. No one knew better than I the sacrifices she had made for me. I recognized that my idea of teaching the children of Morichjhãpi was just an old man’s hallucination, nothing more than a way of postponing an inevitable superannuation. I tried to purge it from my head.

The new year, 1979, came in, and soon afterward Nilima left to go off on one of her periodic fundraising tours for the hospital. A rich Marwari family in Calcutta had agreed to donate a generator; a cousin of hers had become a minister in the state government and she wanted to see him. There was even to be a trip to New Delhi to meet with a senior official in Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s government. All of this had to be tended to.